Missing mom resurfaces 11 years after walking away from family

Eleven years after she vanished without a trace, Brenda Heist approached police in Florida last week to explain that she had abandoned her two children on the spur of the moment, leaving behind her old life in central Pennsylvania to become a vagrant.

By:MARK SCOLFOROThe Associated Press, Published on Thu May 02 2013

LITITZ, PA.— Eleven years after she vanished without a trace, Brenda Heist approached police in Florida last week to explain that she had abandoned her two children on the spur of the moment, leaving behind her old life in central Pennsylvania to become a vagrant.

That new life apparently lost its charm, police in central Pennsylvania said Wednesday as they recounted her journey. It began when three strangers reached out to comfort her as she cried in despair in a park in 2002, then offered to let her accompany them. She took them up on it.

Heist, a car dealership bookkeeper, was going through an amicable divorce and had just been turned down for housing assistance. She left the half-done laundry, the defrosting dinner and her daughter and son, then 8 and 12 years old.

“Everybody that knew Brenda told us there was absolutely no way Brenda would leave her children,” said Lititz Borough Police Detective John Schofield, who suspected for years she may have been killed.

“She explained to me that she just snapped,” said Schofield, who met with her Monday in Florida. “She turned her back on her family, she turned her back on her friends, her co-workers.”

Heist’s now-teenage daughter said Thursday the disclosure has angered her and she is not eager to restart their relationship.

Morgan Heist, 19, said the news has made her recall with bitterness the years of mourning she endured when she assumed her mother was dead and feared she’d been murdered.

“I ached every birthday, every Christmas,” said Heist, a freshman at a community college outside Philadelphia. “My heart just ached. I wasn’t mad at her. I wanted her to be there because I thought something had happened to her. I wish I had never cried.”

After she dropped off her children at school one day, Brenda Heist decided to join the three strangers as they hitchhiked for a month along Interstate 95 on their way to South Florida. She told Schofield she slept in tents and under bridges, survived by scavenging restaurant trash and panhandling, and kept her previous life a secret, contacting no one and using a pseudonym.

But Schofield said Thursday he is looking into reports that have come in over the past day suggesting Brenda Heist’s time in Florida included much less miserable periods.

“We’re getting several calls from people down in Florida that knew her who want to say she’s not being truthful with us,” he said.

Now 54, Heist told police she had become homeless again, living in a tent facility run by a social service agency.

“She said she was at the end of her rope, she was tired of running,” Schofield said.

Her husband, Lee Heist, who was investigated and then cleared as a suspect, struggled to raise their children. By 2010, he was able to get the courts to declare her legally dead and collected on a life insurance policy. He has remarried.

He said he was angry because of the effect their mother’s disappearance had on the children, but he also said he has forgiven her.

“There were people in the neighbourhood who would not allow their children to play with my children” because he had been a suspect, he told reporters.

Schofield said Heist was released from police custody in Florida is staying with a brother there before moving in with her mother in Texas.

Her mother, Jean Copenhaver, said she had spoken to Heist several times and that she “had a real traumatic time” but was doing OK.

Copenhaver said Thursday she has not pressed her daughter about what led her to walk away from the life she knew.

“We haven’t gone into that with her,” she said. “She just needs time to recover, and have some peace and that. She’ll tell us when she’s ready.”

Brenda Heist told Florida authorities that she was on probation and had recently been arrested under the name Kelsie Lyanne Smith.

Jail and court records show Kelsie Lyanne Smith was arrested in January on misdemeanour charges of marijuana possession, possession of drug paraphernalia and providing false identification to law enforcement. After pleading guilty, she was sentenced to time served and was released on Feb. 13. She was also ordered to pay court costs but failed to do so and was found delinquent on April 15.